If you're not a political journalist, the chances are very good that you've never heard of Ron Fournier, the Thomas Friedman of Helen Thomases. Fournier is one of the most-revered of wizened white-guy oracles known collectively as Beltway Types. Today, he wrote the Magna Carta of Beltway columns. Here's how.

National Journal's editorial director and senior political columnist. Longtime AP politics guru. Author of Applebee's America. Honorable mention in a David Brooks essay contest. All of these are true statements about Ron Fournier, but none of them really captures his genius. Ron Fournier is America's palpitating heart, a folksy war addict who hates long wars, a critic of government spending who hates budget cuts, a squared circle who really gets your disgust with all these danged partisans, especially when you're voting for them en masse.

Rare is the talent that can make all of this happen in a single column. Ron Fournier is that rare talent. "The Extraordinary Smallness of Washington," published today, is that column. It is the highest expression of his virtuosity, a brilliance hinted at but never quite attained in his earlier works, "Changing Who Runs the Senate Won't Fix Washington" and "Obama Isn't Listening to Voters He Claims to Hear" and "Republicans Didn't Win the Midterms (They Just Lost Less)."

The challenge of being Ron Fournier is to assume a zenlike monk state in which you immolate your own mind and replace it with a posited American Middle Mind, one that is perpetually and smarmily disgusted with The Way Things Are In This Town where you reside. Here is how he begins in "Smallness":

This is an era of titanic challenges and tiny politics. On issue after issue, the Republican and Democratic parties preen and pose but ultimately duck their responsibilities to solve the transcendent problems of our times.

This is no easy task. You must establish your own authority as someone who knows something about political matters, while distancing yourself from All Politicians, Who Always Ruin Everything:

On immigration, we need durable new rules that give 11 million illegal immigrants some form of legalization without punishing those who followed the old rules, and that acknowledge the steep social costs of porous borders. In other words, true reform would be bipartisan, addressing credible concerns of conservatives and liberals alike.

Instead, we're about to get temporary half-measures issued by fiat from Obama.

You may think this is simply drawing moral equivalencies. But no, that's too narrow a vision. This is about drawing a moral singularity:

On energy, we need a national policy that balances the threat of global warming against the hunger for jobs—one that acknowledges the economic and national security benefits of diversifying our energy buffet.

You have to become familiar enough with a sufficient number of conventional wisdoms, left, right, and center, to add them up and find their mean. You must also be untroubled by the fact that an averaging of many, many incoherent political beliefs is likely to yield an even wilder, less coherent, more vapid mean, untethered to facts of any kind:

On health care, we needed a market-driven plan that decreases the percentage of uninsured Americans without convoluting the U.S. health care system. Just such a plan sprang out of conservative think tanks and was tested by a GOP governor in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney.

You have to pretend, for example, that the paragraph you just wrote is not, in fact, an exact description of what Obamacare actually is.

Instead of a bipartisan agreement to bring that plan to scale, we got more partisan warfare. The GOP resisted, Obama surrendered his mantle of bipartisanship, and Democrats muscled through a one-sided law that has never been popular with a majority of the public.

Oh, and you must paint the president—whoever he is at any moment—as weak, small, and impotent but tyrannical, ponderous, and heavyhanded at the same time. "President Obama is shrinking before our eyes," and in his weakness he may "surrender"—but only so his partisans can "muscle through a one-sided law."

You are the finely machined, well-paid tuning fork that can pick up and pass on a faint tone emanating from the center of the country:

Americans' confidence in all three branches of government has plummeted, Gallup reported in June, reaching record lows for the Supreme Court (30 percent) and Congress (7 percent), and a six-year low for the office of the presidency (29 percent).

Is the GOP responsible for the extraordinary smallness of Washington? How about the Democrats? The answer is, yes—both are. While I would personally place a majority of the onus on a hardened GOP base, parsing the blame doesn't solve the problem.

That's right, you don't play the blame game. Which is to say, you don't really blame one side more than the other, even if you occasionally say you do. You blame everybody. And anyway, what real Americans need are real solutions. And the solution is for everybody to stop blaming everybody:

Small-minded leaders diminish their institutions. In the era of Bush and Obama, the institutions of politics and government are shrinking to irrelevancy or massive disruption.

Predict massive disruption. But not really, because the institutions that you indict are the institutions that also underwrite your fancy wood-paneled suburban Washington elite enclave. Populism has its limits, by God.

Look well, writers, and study. This is how you stay relevant. Massively relevant.